Monitoring the correspondence of the mentally ill in Spanish psychiatric institutions: from care to censorship, 1852-1987

[The women who wrote in the Manicomio Nacional de Leganés after the Spanish Civil War, 1939-1952]

This article uses the medical records of six women admitted to the Manicomio Nacional de Leganés, Madrid (Spain), in which, in addition to medical notes, there are letters and other personal documents. These unsent letters allow us to read about their complaints towards the institution, as well as to recover the voices of the inmates and their resistance to being treated like insane people. This analysis leads us to explore the double marginalization: being "women" and being "mentally ill"; it also brings us closer to building a story from the patient's point of view. The time frame is Franco's dictatorship, during which the implementation of a national-Catholic system undoubtedly reinforced the female hegemonic model of the regime.

[Classifying the women: psychiatric diagnoses and female subjectivity in the Manicomio Provincial de Málaga, Spain, 1909-1950]

The clinical histories of women's asylums allow us to deepen the gap between the positivist illusion of psychiatry during the first half of the 20th century in Spain and the subjective experience of the psychiatric internment of doubly subaltern crazy women. Diagnostic classifications were key in this attempt at positivization. This paper aims to point out which subjectifying elements participated in the application of diagnoses such as schizophrenia, psychopathy, and oligophrenia in the women's wards of the Manicomio Provincial de Málaga, and to show how the hegemonic ideal of femininity established a permeable limit between sanity and madness of women, between assimilations and resistances.